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It seems that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finally beginning to crack down on the growing vape and e-cig industry, after it announced last year that all e-cigarettes and other vaping products will now be regulated in the same way as cigarettes are under the 2007 Family Smoking Prevention & Tobacco Control […]

Great news for the credit card processing industry: Just one year into the shift towards the Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) system in the United States, and counterfeit fraud costs have been slashed by just over 50%. According to a report issued by credit card giant MasterCard in mid-September, counterfeit fraud costs are being sharply […]

Modern payment methods in the United States range from EMV chip cards to digital wallets to bitcoin; however, there’s one traditional form of payment that has managed to survive the shift towards digital. The use of paper checks by American business entities and individuals remains uncomfortably high in the 21st century. A 2013 survey by […]

Over the last couple of years, more retailers and providers of merchant services in the United States have been settling into the new Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) credit card processing system. As EMV acceptance expands, business owners will start to see more technology upgrades offered by through their merchant services providers. One current quirk […]

American companies that use credit card processing and merchant services are on high alert after a Russian hacking group breached the servers of various POS or point of sale systems. The first victim of the breach was tech giant Oracle, which in mid-2016 acquired MICROS Systems, a major provider of POS solutions for the retail […]

Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants is investigating reports of a data breach at several of its properties. Kimpton operates 62 boutique hotels across the country and has begun to look into the scale of this hacking. Management has hired a computer security firm to find out if guest information or internal systems have been hacked. The […]

Discovering Visa and PayPal were partnering up has shaken up the credit card processing industry. It is believed that everything from merchant services to eBay will be affected. Some immediately lauded how the partnership will enhance in-store NFC payments. The most cynical critics believe Visa, with PayPal under its watchful eye, will be better suited […]

Businesses are striving to stay on top of trends in consumer behavior, and mobile payments have been a hotbed of activity. Walmart Pay just rolled out nationwide, and the company is hoping that the app will help them collect more information about how customers use their products and make purchasing decisions. Credit card processing has seen […]

A jarring amount of 17.6 million people (7% of Americans) had at least one incident of identity theft in 2014, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Unfortunately some of that identity theft can come from third parties, including criminals accessing business accounts to get information about consumers. Nonprofits, small businesses and large corporate companies […]

The swipe fee antitrust lawsuit that The Official Merchant Services Blog has been covering for a few years now has an update: Wal-Mart, accusing Visa of excessively high card swipe fees, is suing Visa for $5 billion. The action by Wal-Mart is being taken because Wal Mart opted out of the settlement of the class […]